CATHARSIS
Humans have entered the epoch of self-surveillance and datafication through the use of everyday objects. This practice-led research project seeks to critique surveillance and data capitalism, and its apparatuses of control, including its impact on selfhood. The research scrutinises this topic through frameworks of resistance, surveillance and hyperreality. It aims to reveal the subtle, often hidden ways that surveillance and bureaucracy extract data and help data capitalism enact power. Central to this research is a practice-led methodological approach that draws from contemporary thinkers, anthropologist David Graeber and theorist Estelle Barrett. This methodology allows for resistance and critique of surveillance and data capitalism through the creative act of play and making. A creative-practice focused methodology in this context provided a negation of surveillance and data capitalism’s ‘truth’ and ‘freedom’ to explore unforeseen possibilities. This practice-led research project has addressed how a creative art practice can navigate spaces of contemporary power structures and expose them.